78 NATURE-BASED EXPRESSIVE ARTS THERAPY
what is alive
dissolves the flatness
of our language
what is alive
wants to crawl out
of the little boxes
we have made
with words
Sally Atkins (2010)
Summer offers its abundance of warmth, sun and rain, wild cherries
and blackberries and generous harvests of fruits and vegetables. In
autumn the mountainsides of the Appalachians wear their spectacular
displays of reds, oranges and yellows of oaks, hickories, poplars,
beeches, sassafras, sycamores, buckeyes and black walnuts. Then, as
the trees let go their leaves, the forest floor is covered with a soft
brown carpet. This turning of the seasons reminds us daily that we
are embedded in the ongoing changing processes of the natural
world, in systems of continual change and communication.
To feel ourselves part of this living, interactive process, all
we need do is to tune into our own living body. Immediately we
know that what we call the “self ” is an open system.
Our “self,” like all living things, expands and contracts: the
heart opens and closes, the lungs and abdomen rise and fall,
the earth itself as it moves through space expands and contracts
through the seasons—winter, spring, summer, fall, winter. When
we cease to move in this way we die. (Muller 1996, p.7)
Ecology refers to the study of the relationships among living things.
The word ecology is derived from the Greek oikos , meaning house
or dwelling place. Ecology is the study of our home, the Earth. In our
time some of the most powerful and elegant stories of our world have
come from the sciences, from theories and research findings from
biology, chemistry, physics, geology and all of the transdisciplinary